Centers of projection of the mother countries,
during the colonial period Latin American cities reproduced Spanish and Portuguese
ways of life and altered them as society changed. Almost imperceptibly, these
ways of life were Creolized in the cities under the indirect influence
of the surrounding milieu. The conventions of the hidalgos, their habits
and formalities survived. Yet many things altered the artificial status of the
privileged classes when circumstances removed some of them from their redoubt
and brought them into contact with the new society. This contact came, above
all, through dealing with slaves and servants; it was much more frequent in
the countryside than in the cities. When Independence undermined the traditional
structure of society, urban groups began to be countrified to some
extent. It was inevitable that city ways of living should acquire a kind of
Creole air, the legacy of those rural groups that had become part of urban society.

The countrification process was
not as strong, nor did it move at the same pace everywhere. From very early
on, provincial cities had been surrounded by a rural world, so that they hardly
noticed when the rural influence became more pronounced after Independence.
It was noticeable, however, in those cities where the urban and Iberian tradition
remained alive and those where, after Independence, newly arrived English and
French businessmen joined the rural people whom political upheaval had brought
to the city. These rural people touched urban society at top and bottom; some
were part of the power structure of the new gentry and many of them would climb
to important political positions and become wealthy. Most, however, joined the
ranks of the popular classes, adding some traits not present in the old subordinate
groups of Indians, mestizos and black slaves.These changes were evident
in Caracas, during the Páez and Monagas period, in Montevideo, in Mexico City,
and in Veracruz. But they were most palpable in Buenos Aires, whose atmosphere
during the Rosas period was described by José Mármol in his novel Amalia.
Although quite politically biased, Amalia nevertheless accurately portrays
its setting. The dominant classes were Creole and countrified, yet nevertheless
drawn to the charm of European customs. This strange contrast was the one that
the traveler Xavier Marmier captured in 1850:

To help me explain some of these day-to-day
images, the reader should imagine himself accompanying me for a short stroll
through the streets of the city. We are turning onto Peru Street; to the
right and to the left the luxury and industry of France are showcased in
the furnishings, jewels, and wig shops; in the silks just arrived from Lyon
and the ribbons from Saint-Etienne; and in the latest fashion in dress and
hats. Behind a grillwork window, a young girl is arranging artificial flowers
that would be perfect in a salon in the Saint-Germain quarter of Paris.
In his window, a tailor is placing the new sketch from the Journal des
Modes that just arrived by packet boat from Le Havre and that will be
attracting the attention of the dandies. The owner of a bookshop is carefully
arranging a collection of books on the shelves. He will be puzzled if someone
asks him for the works of Garcilaso de la Vega or some other old Spanish
historian, but he always has on hand the novels of Dumas and Sandeau and
the poetry of Alfred de Musset. One might liken it to a corner of Paris.
One might say it is a copy of the Rue Vivienne, for that is what it is.
Yet it is a copy wearing a scarlet waistcoat, like those worn in Paris after
our famous February revolution.

We walk a little more and go by the English
businesses and by the shop of Favier, who has the same delicate touch for oil
paintings and daguerreotypes. And so we come to City Hall and the Buenos Aires
Police Station and jail. The scene changes abruptly. Whereas we were in Europe
before, we now find ourselves in primitive America, in the Pampas region. Beneath
the arcades, the soldiers sit on horseback. They in no way resemble Europeans.
There are white soldiers and black soldiers, soldiers in uniform and soldiers
without uniforms. One soldier is wearing an Indian poncho and another the narrow
cut of an English jacket. Some have their heads covered with a scarf, others
with a cap, and still others with a brown hat. In that respect, there
is complete freedom. If I am not mistaken, there is only one piece of apparel
that is required: pants that are fringed along the bottom. Soldiers are barefoot.
It occurs to me that in Rosas troops rank can be distinguished by the
lower extremities: soldiers go barefoot, sergeants wear ankle boots, an officer
wears boots of common leather, while generals wear patent leather boots. It
is a more practical way of recognizing military rank than our own, for to know
the rank of a superior officer a subordinate must keep his eyes down.

It is amusing to see how slowly and lazily
these defenders of the city mount guard and carry their rifles. As I watch them,
I hear the sound of horseshoes on the pavement, and a horse gallops up and stops
under the riders masterful hand as if the hoofs were nailed to the ground.
It is an estancia horse, ridden by a gaucho. This is South Americas
true soldier, the son of the Pampas in all his masculine beauty.

After carefully describing the gauchos
dress and customs, the traveler describes the unique ambience of the wagon trains
and portrays the wagon driver as being enclosed within his conception of life,
immersed in his rural atmosphere, although he may be on the fringe of the city
without a thought of ever seeing the obelisk in Victory Plaza or the magnificence
of Peru Street. He ends by saying, Wagon drivers and gauchos: this
is the most picturesque part of Buenos Aires population. Let us look,
however, at other aspects. The city has some 120,000 inhabitants, half of whom
are foreigners from various nations. That was the Buenos Aires of Rosashalf
European and half rural, an extreme example of the change that revolution had
brought to several Latin American cities.

As the traditional forms of communal life
were abandoned, a strange conjunction of rural and Anglo-French influences followed.
Each influence had its adherents, some of whom were aggressive and even fanatical;
some, who accepted both the rural and the Anglo-French influences, produced
curious combinations that astonished the observer and never failed to elicit
irony. But that was the direction life was laboriously taking in the big capitals
and the ports, while the countrified Iberian tradition predominated in cities
that were beyond the reach of Anglo-French influence.

In describing the Mexicans careless
way of dressing, the Marchioness de Calderón de la Barca said:

This indolence is certainly going out
of fashion, especially among the younger members of society, owing perhaps
to their more frequent dealings with foreigners, though it will probably
be a long time before morning at home ceases to be considered the time and
place for being half dressed. Yet I have made many visits where I have found
an entire family very well and neatly dressed; but I have recognized that
in those cases the fathers and, more significantly, the mothers had traveled
to Europe and established a new order of things on their return.

For many in the new upper classes, it seemed
important to preserve the Creole tradition in dress, food, devotions, and festivals.
It seemed necessary to preserve the tradition of the jarochos in Veracruz
or of the gauchos in Buenos Aires, so that the new nationalities could
define their profile. As he described meals around 1840, the Argentine Santiago
Calzadilla said that everything was Creole, and no one even
knew the word menu at the time. He also said that in those days We
were not walking as the French do, but rather in Creole style, a habit
that one of Machado de Asís characters in Don Casmurro criticized
in Rio de Janeiro. But Calzadilla also liked to fancy the southern quarter as
a kind of Saint-Germain; and elsewhere wrote: Of course I like matte;
but I prefer cognac, as it settles the stomach after we eat a good barbecue,
as we usually do here.

This contradiction was not overcome until
the last decades of the century, when foreign usages displaced those of the
Creole tradition, transforming them into some faint and quaint reminiscence
of the past. But from Independence to the end of the century, the new societies
lived in permanent contradiction, elaborating one combination of influences
after another. In Bogotá, there was a clear distinction between those who wore
ruanas and those who wore frock-coats, two social classes, no doubt,
but also the protagonists of two ways of life. The contradiction was even more
obvious among the more elegant people, some of whom had used a ruana
until very recently. While the nativist ideology prompted them to preserve and
even extol whatever was part of their Creole tradition, their upper-class status
induced them to adopt foreign fashion and custom. In the 1840s, the arrival
in Bogotá of Madame Gautron, the first French modiste, was an important
event in the life of the city that had occurred in many other cities after the
first French fashion houses were established in Rio, on the Rua do Ouvidor.
The Argentine intellectual Juan Bautista Alberdi did not think fashion beneath
him (a newspaper that he inspired was called La Moda); in fact, using
the pen name Figarillo, he publicized the Paris fashions that he wanted
Montevideo and Buenos Aires to embrace.

Ornate residences, some the work of French
architects, were home to families that wanted to show off their wealth. They
were showplaces of luxury that people noticed and moralists passionately criticized.
But for a long time that luxury was an exception among traditional families.
Around 1860, Limas novelist Benjamín Cisneros would write a condemnation
of that luxury, yet it was only beginning to appear. Up until then, the rule
had been the Creole lifestyle that Cisneros described in his novel Julia:

Among us, the speed with which individuals
and even entire families form close friendships and boundless trust is a
quality inherent in the character of the country. That is why strangers
who come to our door are immediately received with such affection, kindness
and courtesy. That quality also accounts for the charming idiosyncrasies
of our social way of life. I speak of those things that set our private
life apart, in other words, relations between families, between persons.
The expansiveness, the instinctive empathy, the improvised and sincere affection,
the naive and reciprocal confidences, the tender solicitude, the general
desire to do good, the spirit of charity in the familyall this together
constitutes, among us, a certain realm of the heart that is perhaps not
to be found in other countries on earth. Those of us who were born in our
society and then one day were uprooted and transplanted to the enormous
turbulence of the big modern cities have seen the emptiness that in those
societies replaces intimate feeling, an emptiness lived in a solitude that
lacks any selfless affections, where the heart feels like a desert. We are
the only ones who can appreciate all the sweetness and magic of our life
of emotions.

Yet the patrician cities began to experience
not only the temptation of foreign fashion and foreign objects, but also a new
way of understanding life.

Writers concerned with local color found
a wealth of material to ponder in these societies searching for their identity
between the new and yet old, between Creole and foreign. In Las tres tazas
[The Three Cups], José Maria Vergara y Vergara provides the dates for insignificant
yet revealing changes in Bogotas literary salons: chocolate was introduced
in 1813, coffee in 1848, tea in 1865. The salon was a traditional expression
of Latin American culture, but it was also the cradle of new customs and all
that they implied. Figarillo described in general terms the lifestyle
of Buenos Aires and Montevideo; but few novelists from the period could resist
the temptation to portray in detail the salons in their cities, with their characters
in step with current norms: Cisneros depicted Limas salons, Cuéllar those
of Mexico City, María Nieves those of Arequipa, and Blest Gana those of Santiago,
which were class-based. The novel of manners highlighted the small details of
the setting, the dress, the drinks, and the hors doeuvres that were offered.
The same kind of detail was used to describe parties. In Amalia, the
Argentine José Mármol emphasized the characteristics of the society that gathered
for a dance hosted by Governor Rosas:

People were dancing in silence. The
new-age military men were bursting from their buttoned dress uniforms, their
hands aching from their tight gloves, perspiring with the pain caused by
the boots they had just put on. They thought the only way to behave at a
dance was to be very stiff and serious. Products of the new social hierarchy
introduced by the Restorer of the Law, these young citizens thought in all
good faith that there was nothing more elegant or courtly than to go about
giving sweets and cakes to young ladies. Finally, there were the ladies:
some, the unitarias1, were
there at their husbands request; others, the federales, were
there, angry to find themselves in the company of people of their own society
only. They were all in a bad mood: the former were condescending and patronizing,
and the latter envious.

The Colombian Cordovez Moure recalled a dance
hosted in Popayán for Bolívar by José María Mosquera, the patriarch of
the city, where the Liberator demanded that a young patrician lady dance
with a Colonel Carvajal, a black man from the plains dressed in the uniform
of a Polish hussar. Mosquera also recalled a dance, hosted in 1852 by several
gentlemen from Bogotá, which Mosquera said was the first to introduce
the custom of arranging musicians as spare partners for ladies who might need
them; the President of the Republic was in attendance, and the dance was
so splendid that a Mr. Goschen, a member of the British Parliament on a visit,
said that he felt as if he were at a court ball given by his own sovereign.
Cordovez Moure added that this observation had been made with the honesty
peculiar to the English.

English gentlemen hosted the dance given
in 1840 at the Palacio de Mineria, which the Marchioness de Calderón de la Barca
attended In jewels no foreign ladies could attempt to compete with those
of the country. But she added: Many dresses looked overloaded, a
common fault in Mexico; and many of the dresses, though rich, were old-fashioned.
It was a United States citizen living in Chile, the bold entrepreneur Henry
Meiggs, who in 1866 hosted a magnificent dance at his luxurious mansion on the
Alameda in Santiago, surrounded by gardens. There, Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna
saw an immaculate society, quite different to be sure from the one that Blest
Gana had a few years earlier portrayed at the dances that he described in El
ideal de un calavera (The Ideal of a Gay Dog) and in Martín Rivas.
There Mackenna found the serious fools, the chinchosos,
and above all, the dandies whom few women can resist; they
speak only in thousands of pesos, nothing less! They either have gone or are
planning to go to Europe and keep up an endless chatter of nonsense, because,
as his fictional observer says, Wherever people gather together, there
are always some who are stranger than anything one could possibly see in a zoo.

Theaters and fashionable summer spotslike
Chorrillos for the inhabitants of Limawere another place where the upper
classes went to be seen. As in salons and dances, the theater began to exhibit
the same quality observed by novelists: the increasing tendency toward luxury.
It was not a natural tendency for Creole society, but rather an imitation of
the styles that were beginning to emerge in Europe with industrial development
and the formation of the first great cities, particularly the styles that arouse
among the new Paris bourgeoisie during the reign of Louis Philippe and took
definite shape under Napoleon III. But not every luxury was of the same vintage.
By mid-century, Latin America still preserved its colonial opulence, such as
that displayed by many families more or less aristocratic, or the one observed
by Flora Tristán at the Convent of Santa Catalina in Arequipa. This colonial
opulence was the source of the Creole luxury that followed revolutions and that,
although more moderate and a bit coarse, carried on the habits and customs of
patriarchs accustomed to life on the hacienda. But the new patrician
elite made a deliberate effort to present themselves and their new luxury as
part of the extravagant world of the new European bourgeoisie, seen through
the Parisian model. Some habits and fashions were imitated, but a long time
would pass before the quality of the Creole way of life, fashioned after Independence,
would actually change. It was thus an opulence without style, incoherently displayed
in a way of life that had its own style and thatin its dominancebetrayed
the imposition of a foreign veneer.

In some cities, elderly nouveau riche,
elegant young men, and equivocal ladies were part of the frivolous society beginning
to show through the fabric of traditional society. They were, as José T. Cuéllar
wrote in Ensalada de Pollos, the children of pleasure. He
was speaking of those who would begin or end a nights spree at Fulcheris,
the Mexican café where a meal looked like one of those almost-Pompeian
dinners at the English Café in Paris. The Mexican pollo, like Bogotas
cachaco or the elegant men of any city who had traveled to Europe and
could never overcome the impact of the lights of Paris, were unitedfor
the traditionalistswith the image of all young men who fall for the overwhelming
temptation of luxury, just as the Paris prostitute falls from the palace
to the hospice, as Cuéllar put it. Looking for explanations, he spoke
of the torrent of Paris corruption and of the social upheaval
in this transition period we are experiencing. In 1860, ten years before
these words were written, Cisneros examined, in his novel Julia, the
causes of the decadence that threatened traditional society: Luxury is the golden
serpent in this society. It has wrapped itself around societys heart and
will devour it. Luxury is no longer just a question of habit: it is a passion,
a vice of our families. Luxury dazzles and attracts; it produces vertigo and
fever. The society in which we live has come to that point. And he went
on to say: Lima is gripped not so much by a passion for opulent style
as by a passion for everything foreign.

Despite the self-righteous indignation of
moralists, the threat was barely perceptible at that time. Society continued
to be creolized even when this trendwhich would ultimately triumph several
decades laterwas first surfacing among the wealthy classes in a few cities.
The rebozo, said Cuéllar, is the most intimate companion
of a lady in Mexico. French customs generally go by the wayside when it comes
to this essential item of clothing, this reassertion of nationality, this rebozo
of such strange suppleness, so typically Mexican. Criollismo and
Europeanism were engaged in an all-out war to determine which customs would
prevail.

Although on a lesser scale, the middle classes
were also drawn to European-style luxury. The Creole way of life could withstand
the onslaught of European influences largely because of the strength it still
had among the middle classes and the common people. But an open society, where
the vicissitudes of politics or fortune allowed a nouveau riche to appear,
place its middle classes in a stage of upward social mobility that raised certain
expectations and, to a moderate extent, satisfied them. In Chile it was precisely
the siútico (pseudo-refined) who typified this situation. Blest Gana
described the type in detail in Martin Rivas. Almost everyone was a siúticoaffected
and pretentious, one might sayat the rather dubious salon on Colegio street
where Blest Gana sends his character, for they all had that je ne se
quoi with which a good Santiagan distinguishes questionable people (gente
de medio pelo). A keen observer, in his description Blest Gana combined
elements of the Creole way of life with the imported elements which that family,
modest in circumstance but pretentious, copied from others who were more worldly
and wealthy. Describing the end of the party when the refreshments at this vulgar
little gathering were over, he commented:

And after the stiffness with which they
had mimicked the customs of high society at the beginning of the festivities
came this mixture of intimacy and forced courtesy that is so typical of
this type of gathering. The people that we call de medio pelo find
themselves caught between the common people whom they despise and the good
families whom they envy and want to imitate. The result is a curious combination
in which the customs and habits of the working classes are adulterated by
vanity and those of the upper social groups are exaggerated to the point
of caricature under a veneer of wealth and good manners.

Only a few years would separate that party
from the one that Cuéllar describes in Baile y cochino [The Pig at the
Party], with the Colonel and Doña Bartolita. Describing the scene, Cuéllar noted
that it was not of his choosing: Unfortunately it exists; worse still,
it is spreading in Mexico, to the detriment of morals and good customs. The
growing invasion of luxury in the middle class is causing more and more collapses.
He then describes the dance with the Colonel and Doña Bartolita, attended by
snobbish young girls like the Machuca sisters and elegant dandies who wanted
to amuse themselves and get drunk. But luxury could not disguise the old customs,
which resurfaced as the conventional and trained starchiness wore off. It was
not without reason that the author, at the beginning of the piece, noted that
the lady of the house was very simple and very provincial. Her husband
was a colonel who had just made a quite profitable business deal.
They had cognac, but one of their guests thought that the water was pulque.

At public festivals, whether they were patriotic
or religious in nature, everyone came together; Independence Day in Mexico,
July 20 in Colombia, September 7 in Brazil, and May 25 in Argentina; then there
were the feasts of Corpus Christi, Our Lord of the Miracles, and Our Lady of
Guadalupe. Describing the multitude who gathered to celebrate September 18 in
Santiago, Blest Gana wrote: Old customs and modern ways rub elbows everywhere;
they look upon each other as sisters, tolerate each others respective
weaknesses, and join in singing anthems to country and freedom. But these
were exceptional occasions. The old aristocratic families and the upper middle
classes avoided contact with the common people: the lepers in Mexico
City, the vagrants in Buenos Aires, the rotos in Santiago. Common people
lived in their own neighborhoods and preserved their own customs, in which one
could see the strength of the Creole tradition. Those who considered themselves
superior saw ignorance, vulgarity, and poverty in the common people. Yet they
never ceased to cherish what the lower classes had preserved of their native
heritage, including their regional foods, their colorful dress, their ancient
crafts, and their proverbs that captured a lifetime of experience. Everyone
went to their festivals on the outskirts of the city to hear their songs and
see their dances. Although no one with any social aspirations would have dared
to include such songs and dances in their own parties, they sensed in them a
power lacking in the fashionable arias from Italian opera or the polkas and
waltzes popular in the salons. Perhaps some vestige of Spanish and Portuguese
tradition was the bridge between that living past and the attraction for the
other Europe that was neither Spain nor Portugal.

In the cities, the common people traded rural
poverty for urban poverty, especially in those cities that grew in population
and wealth. They were confined to marginal, poverty-stricken neighborhoods,
an altogether different world from the center of the city. In Buenos Aires one
needed to be bold to venture into the Tambor district, which was a predominantly
black neighborhood. On her way to the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Marchioness
de Calderón de la Barca passed through Mexico Citys suburbs, which she
described as poor, ruined, dirty, and with such a mixture of bad odors
that it could only be overcome by a dose of cologne. To the south, in
São Paulo and La Palma, the situation was the same. The suburbs of Malambo in
Lima and Chimba in Santiago were a collection of primitive, dirty shacks, where
the monotonous misery was broken only by the cheer one found at the brothels
or the sleazy gambling houses. And in Arequipas suburb called Otra Banda
or in Las Nieves, one of the districts of Bogotá, the poor lived in a closed
and separate world. The lower classes of Valparaiso built their houses in its
ravines, and in imperial Rio de Janeiro the cortiços or tenement houses
were built atop one another in Botafogo. One of these cortiços was described
by Aluizio de Azevedo in the novel titled O Cortiço: This enormous
tenement consisted of 95 hovels. Once it was completed, Juan Roman built a high
wall out front, topped with crushed glass and bottle bottoms, with a main entrance
in the center, where he hung a colored crystal lantern on a panel that read:
San Roman Tenement District. Shacks and bath tubs to rent. Azevedo went
on to describe the first stirrings in the morning: And on that swampy,
wet earth, in that warm and muddy dampness, a world began to stir, just like
an ant hill, bubbling and growing, a living thing that seemed to erupt right
there, from that quagmire, and multiply like larvae in a manure pile.
Italians and Portuguese intermarried with Brazilians who had escaped from the
fazendas, forming hybrid families that were a confusing combination of
the most varied traditions, habits and customs. What happened in Rio happened
in other Brazilian cities and in cities in other countries: in Barranquilla,
in Colón, in Panama City, in Veracruz. La Boca in Buenos Aires was a very special
case where almost the entire population was from Genoa. They preserved their
customs and traditions for a long time.

Even the poorest could be seen in the downtown
district of the cities. They could be found alongside distinguished people at
public festivals, bullfights, and cockfights. But they gathered together alone
in the tavernschicherías, picanterías, pulperíasthat dotted
the city, even its downtown area, to accommodate the lower classes who worked
in the city center. But their kingdom was the marketplace and its surroundings.
They came from as far away as the suburbs, carrying their produce and wares
for sale. Open-air markets, or occasional enclosed ones like the Concepción
in Lima, completed in 1854, or the Abundancia in Montevideo, completed in 1859,
were the meccas of produce. The selling was done in traditional fashion: Indian
women sat with their legs crossed, their fruits and vegetables, meats and fish,
and especially country-style prepared foods (a combination of Indian and Creole
ingredients) stretched out on a piece of fabric. As fond as the upper classes
were of foreign cuisine, almost no one could resist the traditional fare, washed
down by the local traditional beverage. A multi-colored little world surrounded
the market and spilled over into the neighboring streets, which were lined with
shops and vendors hawking their wares on the sidewalk. In the area surrounding
Limas Concepción Market was the Chinese district. In 1876 a German traveler,
Ernst Wilhelm Middendorf, wrote:

Amid elegant shops selling oriental wares,
one finds greasy, narrow little shops selling every imaginable type of unpalatable
food, with pale, squalid men crouching on the floor; the unpleasant odor
of opium fills the entire area. The little restaurants in this part of the
market are run only by Chinese, and all the dishes are prepared Chinese
style and served in the same fashion.

Less exotic but no less colorful were the
areas around the Volador and Merced markets in Mexico City, or the markets in
the provincial cities of Oaxaca, Toluca, or Veracruz, Puerto Cabello or Barquisimeto,
Colón, Bahía, or Copiapó.

The outskirts were dens of urban crime, where
no one knew who anyone was and no one asked the new arrival about his past.
Gradually, police forces were organized in the more important cities, but the
lack of security was great. Larceny, robbery, and assaults were alarming to
citizens. Criminals who made incursions into the downtown area had their hideouts
in the outskirts or even further out. In the outskirts, they combined their
criminal activities with others like gambling, pimping, or cockfighting. Santiago
de Marfil, a suburb of Guanajuato, became legendary, as did other mining cities.
In the city itself, the occasional gentleman bandit would organize
a gang of professional thieves to conduct large-scale operations under his intelligent
supervision. Such was the case with a Bogota attorney by the name of José Raimundo
Russi, whose gangs terrorized the city in 1851: Every house in the city
became a fortress, recalled Cordovez Moure in recounting the feats and
the end of this gentleman bandit.

Houses tended to become fortresses for other
reasons as well. Political centers above all, cities were the stages for power
struggles. But often they were just thata stagesince most of society
did not participate, knowing that the dispute was between armed groups who each
backed pretenders to the presidency. The capitals knew that they were the spoils
of war, and their anguish translated itself into a kind of accommodating apathy.
The Peruvian Felipe Pardo y Aliaga described peoples spontaneous reaction
in the face of danger:

Sensing they are the spoils of war,
Citizens shout: Shut the doors!
And right away streets and squares are,
As if by electric shock, deserted.
Is it strange, then, that the aspirant
To rule should find the gates
To power open, if,
after he announces his criminal intent,
Each citizen closes only his own doors?

That was what Pardo y Aliaga had to say about
Limas political sensibility. A few years earlier in 1846, the Venezuelan
Juan Vicente González, thinking that the republic was lost, cursed Caracas because
it corrupts the ways of youth, weakens itself by vice, creates and promotes
fictitious needs that will devour poor people, andas a new Sybarisgrows
lethargic, sleeps, and is annoyed by a fall of a rose petal, when it should
be an example of frugality, love of work, and active, committed patriotism.
Denouncing the citys political indifference, he concludes, When
will you have your share of misfortune, selfish Caracas? Shortly thereafter,
recalling the final episode in the Mexican civil war of 1860, in his Evolución
política del pueblo mexicano [Political Evolution of the Mexican People]
Justo Sierra wrote: From its balconies and rooftops Mexico City, a city
of reactions, clerical city par excellence, applauded all the victories of Miramón
and Márquez; at every irreverent festival of the civil war, Mexico City poured
into the downtown streets to carry the victor on its shoulders, to shout and
whistle with enthusiasm, and to steal handkerchiefs and watches; waving rifle
stocks and flags, dragging the artisans and the poor from their slums and out
of the colossal shadow of the convents, Mexico City greeted the entrance of
the reformist army of González Ortega with a kind of delirium. And this was
so because Mexico was not a clerical, but a plainly Catholic city, and the civil
war had made everyone indifferent to everything except peace. Ones meager
earnings were by this time no longer requested but rather literally stolen by
the treasury agent; the honest man was taken from his home and workshop and
put on the barricades and in the slaughterhouse of the battlefield. Everyone
clamored for peace, the common folk in the city square and the bourgeoisie from
their balconies and roofs. While the cities were the setting of the struggles
for power, very few people had an active role to play; the others were mere
spectators.

Small groups were involved in these power
struggles. Sometimes they were organized as political parties, but for the most
part they were simply interest groups or opinion groups that supported certain
leaders of recognized standing. They were either politicians or military men,
and the difference between the one and the other was not always clear. Civilians
were tempted by military rank because they knew that could be decisive in politics.
But the military themselves, trained to act and with an authoritarian mentality,
understood that they had to accept the rules of political play if they were
to consolidate their own power and stabilize the position of the group that
supported them. Politics were decided in the cities, either through elections
or uprisings. Even Brazil, with its imperial rule, could not escape this fate;
and when Pedro I abdicated, Brazil not only had to endure the threat of national
disintegration but it also had to face successive revolutions in Recife and
Bahía. In other countries, military uprisingsin some cases the revolutionsdisrupted
the life of the cities with dramatic regularity. Arequipa and Lima went through
several military uprisings. La Paz saw revolutionary governments
come and go. From time to time, Guayaquil would make a bid for the power wielded
by Quitos aristocracy. The phenomenon was so widespread that recounting
its details would be tantamount to writing a history of each country and of
its cities.

Two kinds of revolutions could be distinguished:
there were simple military coups, like the one that brought Santa Ana to power,
of which the Marchioness of Calderón de la Barca left a written account; there
were also uprisings that polarized public opinion and disturbed society in the
cities where they broke out. Of this second kind, Blest Gana described one that
took place in Santiago; María Nieves y Bustamante described another in Arequipa.
Whether engaged or indifferent, urban societies came out of the experience diminished
and disillusioned, almost always frustrated in their hopes, because victory
never brought about that rebirth to which it aspired: one power
group would replace another, without ever establishing a consensual and consistent
political program.

Blest Gana perceived that the struggle for
power between the dominant groups was not the only element at play in the revolution
that he described in Santiago. Cordovez Moure was even more explicit in his
description of the political conflicts that took place in Bogota between 1851
and 1853. The struggle for power was sharpened by a class confrontation when
the cachacos, from bourgeois families, challenged the tradesmen, organized
in popular societies that had somehow captured the revolutionary wave of 1848.
The district of Las Nieves was the scene of an all out battle; shortly thereafter
General José María Melo started his popular revolution, which was subsequently
thwarted by the alliance of all the political and military forces in the country.

Cordovez Moure also recounted an exemplary
election on March 7, 1849, in which the Legislative Chambers, meeting in Bogotas
Church of Santo Domingo, was to choose between General José Hilario López, the
candidate of the people, and Dr. Rufino Cuervo, the candidate of the conservative
party, who had the support of Dr. José Joaquín de Gori. Tensions were running
high in the city, and for a time it seemed that the election would end in tragedy.
But the process went on without incident, and General López won the election.
News of the election of General López, wrote Cordovez Moure, was
enthusiastically received by the people outside the church. The shouting was
deafening. Squeezed together inside the multitude, some would hug each other,
even at the risk of being asphyxiated. Others would toss their hats in the air.
The deputies who supported General Lopez were cheered as they left the church,
arm in arm with the Congressmen. The fireworks and the pealing of the cathedral
bells announced to the city that a president had been elected, and supporters
of the victorious candidate swarmed through the streets preceded by the military
band of Battalion No. 5 and of the National Guard, shouting Long live
López!, Long live the sovereign people! 

Had it been the election of congressmen,
the list might have been put together as it was in that gathering in Buenos
Aires that Lucio V. López described in La gran aldea [The Big Village].
There, the author says, My aunts party introduced candidates who
nominated themselves in a family gathering. It was around 1860.

To be fair, and above all to be accurate,
most of the bourgeoisie of Buenos Aires were members of my aunts party;
the decent and wealthy families; the families with the traditional surnames,
that kind of Buenos Aires aristocracy that was clean, illiterate, dumb,
proud, boring, provincial, honorable, rich and fat; there were social and
political reasons for the existence of that party. Born as a legitimate
party when Rosas fell from power, its members had endured Rosas domination
and control for twenty years and had, unwittingly, absorbed all the vices
of that era. With all their great and enthusiastic ideas about freedom,
they had broken the chains without breaking away from their political inheritance.
Thus, the party did not transform the moral stance of its children; it made
them ranchers and shopkeepers in 1850. It looked with distrust at the university
and regarded the daring talent of new men, who were capable but poor, as
a threat to its existence; it created and raised its families in luxurious
places, with all the unconscious pretensions to the big life, to elegance
and social standing. Unwittingly, unintentionally, perhaps, unavoidably,
the party kept its historical character intact, a character that was honorable
and virtuous but also routine-bound and dull.

These were political groups rather than well
organized parties. Perhaps they simply were power groups that only circumstantially
adopted an electoral strategy and an ideological label. But it was hard to know,
in those unstable and constantly changing societies, the degree of consensus
that each group could legitimately claim. As it was hard to find a definite
ideological response to immediate problems that had never been envisioned in
the standard political doctrines. For this reason, power was always pragmatic,
and it was only vaguely based on theory.

Power had its real base on might: first,
on the might of arms, and also on the might that power itself creates. This
is why national and provincial capitals were so important, because those cities
were the centers where power was wielded and controlled. But, in the end, power
was always personal, and the physical presence of the person in power or of
those who acted directly on his behalf was a magnet and a source of influence.
The palace or fortress or government house
were in some cases sumptuouslike the imperial courts of Boa Vista
or Chapultepecand in some others modest. But they were always seen as
enclosures where secret schemes were constantly plotted, so secret that only
their later effects would ever be known or felt. There, to palace, had to go
anyone who wanted to obtain something, especially if it was something that power
could bestow even if the seeker was not legitimately entitled to have it: a
lesser degree of power and, above all, easy wealth gotten with official blessing.
Relatives, friends, political allies wandered through waiting rooms and hallways
and, if they could, moved their homes closer to the seats of power, especially
if power was in the hands of some Creole autocrat, laden with epaulets and medals
and anxious to be courted.

Every capital city had its moment of high
drama from the overwhelming presence of power. In 1868 the Chilean José Victorino
Lastarria explained how pressure from an authoritarian government had altered
Santiagos social landscape:

An omnipotent and repressive government
has been in control for thirty-six years, its base of support being the
interests of a narrow, small oligarchy, in other words a few genteel men
and families that have encircled and sustained it. That all powerful government
has always had its way; it has always taken the initiative, claimed sole
right to decide what was good and what was bad, what was just and what unjust.
Any citizen who has had the audacity not to submit to it, to criticize and
oppose it, has been scorned and persecuted by the official power and by
the wealthy and mighty oligarchy that supports it.

Lastarria also pointed out the effects of
such an abuse of power:

Thirty years ago Santiago was not what
it is today. We who are now old knew Santiago when it was happy, gay, jovial
and sincere. It is curious to see how the nature and the inclinations of
Santiagos people have changed in the last thirty years and how they
have acquired their present habits of deceit, apathy, and of quiet sadness,
striking not only to foreigners but also to the people of other provinces.

Quito under the rule of García Moreno was
described exactly the same way, as was Buenos Aires under Rosas and La Paz under
Melgarejo. And even worse could have been said about the provincial authorities
when chance and circumstances helped them become local satraps.

When a republican system of government was
in place, the opposition could express its views in Congress. These assemblies
were thus another focus of political life in the cities. Congressional debates
often turned out to be oratorical contests, and speeches became influential
thanks to the newspapers that published and commented on them. There were memorable
debates in all the congresses; in some cases, what made them memorable were
the doctrines invoked in the debates and the ways in which those doctrines were
presented; in other cases, it was reach and importance of the questions being
discussed; still in others, it was the play of dramatic tensions that surrounded
the sessions. Since all political persuasions were housed under the same congressional
roof, the legislatures were sometime the scene of tragic episodes that rocked
the entire city. The President of the Chamber of Representatives of Buenos Aires
was assassinated in his office in 1839 when a conspiracy headed by his son was
uncovered; in Caracas, on January 24, 1848, mobs stormed Congress, killing or
wounding several lawmakers. Constitutional congresses that were to draft a constitution
sometimes met in provincial cities: deputies from all over the country would
travel to some quiet spot, away from the passions of the capital city and the
entire country. The Ecuadorian Constitution of 1835 was signed in Ambato; Argentinas
Constitution was signed in Santa Fe in 1853; Venezuelas 1858 Constitution
was signed in Valencia; and Colombias 1863 Constitution was signed in
Río Negro. Once the constitutions had been signed, the conventions were dissolved
and peace returned to the provincial communities.

The life and peace of many cities was disrupted
by foreign siege and occupation. Besieged by Castilla, Arequipa called itself
Sebastopol, while Montevideo, besieged by Oribe, was called the
New Troy. Foreign ships blockaded the Río de la Plata and bombarded the
Fort of Valparaiso. United States and French forces occupied Veracruz; Chilean
forces occupied Lima. National armies occupied cities during the civil wars
and at times behaved more cruelly and ruthlessly than the foreign forces. Each
time, cities were called to make sacrifices, and the cohesiveness of urban societies
was put to the test.

Side by side with the development of the
political city, the intellectual city came to life. The old colonial universities,
like the University of Santo Domingo, the universities in Mexico and Lima, in
Guatemala, Quito, Charcas, or Cordoba, languished in the midst of the political
upheavals and of new intellectual aspirations. Some of them were reborn, like
the one in Santiago under the guidance of the Venezuelan Andres Bello. New universities
emerged, like the University of Buenos Aires and the University of Arequipa.
São Paulos law school had such an intense intellectual life that for a
long time it defined São Paulo as a university town, a sort of American Coimbra.
Students were the citys most identifiable social group, even though they
came from very different Brazilian cities, including Rio, which had a medical
school. In old high schools, like Bogotas Rosario, and in old academies,
like those in Bahía and Rio de Janeiro, intellectual battles were waged to replace
old ideas with new ones, heavily influenced by French thought.

In order to encourage the study of his nations
history, Brazils Emperor Pedro II had established his Brazilian Institute
of History and Geography in Rio de Janeiro in 1838. Andrés Lamas founded the
Institute of History and Geography of Uruguay in Montevideo in 1843, and Bartolomé
Mitre founded the Río de la Plata Institute of History and Geography in 1854
in Buenos Aires. In Mexico, Lucas Alamán, historian and politician, founded
the Museum of Antiquities and Natural History in 1823, and José María Vergara
y Vergara promoted the establishment of the Colombian Academy in Bogota. In
many other cities, new learned societies and new publicationshistorical,
literary or philosophical journals and newspapers designed to disseminate ideasgave
proof of the persistent, and often ephemeral, attempts to bring together the
intellectual resources of the cities. Then there were the salons, where books
and ideas were discussed, like the one that Vergara himself founded in Bogotá,
called El Mosaico.

But newspapers were the chief instruments
of intellectual life, which could rarely be disentangled from political life.
Poets, like the Argentine Juan Cruz Varela, the Ecuadorian José Joaquín de Olmedo
and the Colombian Julio Arboleda, writers of prose narrative and essayists,
all participated, to a degree, in the political struggles and dedicated long
hours to journalism. Almost every city of any importance had one or more publications
devoted to the dissemination of ideas. Newspapers circulated among the active,
enlightened groups of the bourgeoisie, and their contributing writers included
liberal intellectuals and staunch conservatives, as well as the occasional supporter
of some cause or project or of some local chieftain. Almost daily, the best
pens in Latin America wrote for militant newspapers with an unmistakable bias.
And the enlightened groups of the bourgeoisie, who were the readers of these
newspapers, took the ideas they had read about to the salons, cafes, squares,
and atriums, and passed them on to others with their own personal comments,
summaries and elaborations, until those ideas became the shared patrimony of
everyone across all layers of society. Trends of thought and opinion were thus
formed and even deformed in the urban world, where the writer-journalist, who
voiced the concerns of small urban communities, was known to everyone and was
expected to comment on or argue for or against the burning issues of the day.

The busiest street in every capital city
had a bookstore filled with the foreign books most popular with the curious
and the snobs. Bookstores also housed literary circles that gathered together
people who read the same books and faithfully followed the same authors. These
were the same people who also gathered at the theater, in newspaper offices,
and in Congress. Politics and literature were inseparable in the patrician city.